it and
tossed it about as a ball in a game of shuttlecock, and dropped it when we
tired of it, as we do other criticism. But he gave it to us as a man, as a
personality, and we find it too strong for us. It is easier to deal with a
theory than with the concrete reality. A man is a summons and a challenge,
and will not be easily put aside.

The great philosophical poets, like Lucretius, try to solve the riddles.
Whitman's aim is only to thrust the riddles before you, to give you a new
sense of them, and start the game afresh. He knows what a complex,
contradictory thing the universe is, and that the most any poet can do is
to break the old firmament up into new forms. To put his arms around it?
No. Put your arms around your fellow-man, and then you have encompassed it
as nearly as mortal can do.

VI

Whitman's attraction toward the common people was real. There is one thing
that makes every-day humanity, the great, toiling, unlettered masses,
forever welcome to men who unite great imagination with broad
sympathies,--they give a sense of reality; they refresh, as nature always
refreshes. There is a tang and a sting to the native, the spontaneous,
that the cultivated rarely has. The farmer, the mechanic, the sailor, the
soldier, savor of the primal and the hardy. In painting his own portrait,
Whitman makes prominent the coarser, unrefined traits, because here the
colors are fast,--here is the basis of all. The careful student of Whitman
will surely come to see how all the elements of his picture--his pride,
his candor, his democracy, his sensuality, his coarseness,--finally fit
together, and correct and offset each other and make a perfect unity.

No poet is so easily caricatured and turned into ridicule as Whitman. He
is deficient in humor, and hence, like the Biblical writers, is sometimes
on the verge of the grotesque without knowing it. The sense of the
ridiculous has been enormously stimulated and developed in the modern
mind, and--what is to be regretted--it has been mostly at the expense of
the sense of awe and reverence. We "poke fun" at everything in this
country; to whatever approaches the verge of the ridiculous we give a push
and topple it over. The fear which all Americans have before their eyes,
and which is much stronger than the fear of purgatory, is the fear of
appearing ridiculous. We curb and check any eccentricity or marked
individuality of manners or dress, lest we expose ourselves to the shafts